I actually posted this back in December, but forgot to post the link over to the Duke Blog.
Have a look.
Want to Help Birds? Be a Citizen Scientist
Have a look.
Want to Help Birds? Be a Citizen Scientist
Showing posts with label ebird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ebird. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Birds of La Hesperia, five state lifers, more on ebird and a nesting Cerulean video!
I promised when I started this blog that I would go back and revisit some of my birding experiences in South America. So to make good on this promise I present to you the birds of La Hesperia:
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| Birds of La Hesperia |
In here are all my best bird shots from La Hesperia, the biological station where I worked from January through June, 2010. They are roughly ordered from best to worst in terms of quality, with some hilariously poor shots toward the end (see Blue Seedeater and Black Hawk-Eagle).
I included bad pictures in a record keeping effort. Nobody to my knowledge has previously worked on a photo inventory for this site. And all were taken on site. I have better shots of some species, but they were taken elsewhere and have not been included.
So while this is not meant to be exhibition of my photographic skills (and I don't even claim to be a photographer), some of them did come out pretty well. If you would like to use any, just please give me credit and mention La Hesperia. There are also a handful by my friend David Kilner (a.k.a. "Colorado" on www.scottsup.blogspot.com) and these are marked DK.
Also this is a bit of a challenge to anyone who fancies him or herself as a naturalist or photographer, and somehow ends up at La Hesperia, to photograph any species I was unable to capture or to submit better photos so I can take down some of the embarrassingly bad images.
For more information on La Hesperia, see www.lahesperia.org or visit the facebook page.
Turning to domestic birds...
I participated in another fall count back on Sept. 25: Jeff Pippen's in Duke Forest gate 23 (Korstian division). I got the times mixed up and showed up 15-minutes early and was serendipitously rewarded by a Common Raven being mobbed by several American Crows. The raven is quite a good bird for the Piedmont and state bird #210 for me! (#209 was Cattle Egret, which I had seen before but somehow left off my NC list).
Other wildlife pretty much stole the show for the rest of the count. A big copperhead was a highlight for the other student participants. And Jeff got really excited about this butterfly:
...which apparently is somewhat rare. (a White M Hairstreak, can you see the white 'm'?)
We did encounter a small migrant flock at the bridge near the end with Magnolia Warbler, Northern Parula, Black-throated Blue Warbler and
I quickly made up for these misses when I went out to Eno River State Park (off Pleasant Green Road) with Norm Budnitz three days later. Warblers were thick along the river and we managed 11 species including the missing Black-throated Blue (NC #211) and Chestnut-sided (#212) as well as Cape May (#213) and Tennessee (#214).
A pair of noisy Pileated Woodpeckers kept trying to distract us from the warbler show and with a Hairy Woodpecker and a couple Red-headed present (not to mention the ubiquitous Downy and Red-bellied) we were only a sapsucker short of a woodpecker sweep.
Also in the mix were about 10 Yellow-billed Cuckoos (pictured),
a couple Scarlet Tanagers and the other warblers: Blackburnian, Redstart, Parula, Pine, Yellowthroat, Black-and-White, Magnolia. I ended up being probably my best day of fall migrants outside of trips to Block Island, RI.I'll finish this post with a few more comments about ebird...
My discussion on ebird last time generated nice comments from a couple other bird bloggers: Ali Iyoob (see his birding journal) and Andrew, who keeps a blog on birding in Arizona. It turns out a lot of folks keep birding blogs, in fact there's already another one that calls itself birds on the brain. Since it was started a few months before mine, I should probably think about changing the name. Any suggestions?
Another nice thing about ebird is that regional volunteers check up on rare sightings among lists and contact birders to confirm that a mistake was not made. This has happened to me three times so far and in one case it alerted me to a life tick I had missed. I had recorded a few sightings of Pied Oystercatcher in New Zealand. At some point this species was split into Pied (in Australia) and South Island (in New Zealand).
So I went back and corrected the errors in my data for accuracy's sake and got a life tick in the process. I had lost a few ticks while updating my checklist due to various lumps, so I am now at 1443, but who knows what other splits out there I am missing out on? Hopefully some alert volunteer will see the red flags in my list backlog and help me out!
Finally I'm going to end with an amazing HD video of Cerulean Warblers nesting behavior taken by my friend, Peter Capobianco. I promise it will blow you away (make sure to chose the highest resolution and watch full screen!)
Pete is also a fantastic photographer and puts anything I'll ever post here to shame.
Check out his work: http://www.naturalescapesimagery.com/
And his new Zazzle storefront where you can buy sick refrigerator magnets! : http://www.zazzle.com/natural_escapes
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Chatham County fall count and transition to ebird
I have been meaning to post much sooner, but a few relevant changes have been taking up what would normally be blogging time:
1) A new computer! My 4-year-old Dell is on its last legs and rather than watch it die along with whatever data I hadn't managed to back up, I got a new sleek and light ASUS.
And this change led me to...
2) Move all my bird lists to ebird.
I only used Avisys listing software for a couple years, but I was never really that impressed. It could do a lot of things as a piece of software, but rarely in an intuitive or expedient way (somewhat reminiscent of Windows 3.1 in look and function). Surprisingly it is the best piece of bird listing software available based on reviews.
Anyway, in order to move my lists over from Avisys to ebird I had to first update my Clements checklist from 2005 to 2009...an exercise in tedium that highlighted all that is wrong with Avisys.
(you should really skip reading this example, but I'm going to write it anyway as if you care)
Between 2005 and 2009 ornithological experts split, lump and rename dozens of bird species (i.e. White-vented Storm-Petrel should be renamed "Eliott's Storm-Petrel"). When trying to update to the new checklist with updated names, new species discoveries, lumps and splits, Avisys doesn't know what to do with my sighting of a now nonexistent bird--there is no White-vented Storm--Petrel anymore.
The solution? Sift through .pdfs from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 of Clements updates for the line that says: "White-vented Storm-Petrels shall heretoforthwith be knownst as 'Eliott's Storm-Petrels'" and manually rename the species. But often the bird will have changed names again, or the latin name also changes, or Avisys simply can't recognize a crucial apostrophe or hyphen, or for unknown reasons an error message still comes up when trying to update.
For "problem species" Avisys advises you (if you are patient enough to read through a page of instructions--which is necessary to achieve most things without problems in the Avisys world) to put that sighting in a different "safe" species temporarily, run find a pen and paper to scribble down the change you made in order to remember to change it back once the checklist has successfully updated. So I renamed my Storm-Petrel "White-faced" (a species that existed in 2005 and still exists today under the same name) and then repeated this process with 25 other "problem species" only to have to swap them back later after a successful checklist update.
Anyway, the whole process must have taken 2 hours and I had not even gotten started importing data into Ebird! There are at least 1,000 easy ways Avisys could easily make the update process run more smoothly. Why anyone puts up with this sort of insanity from a program that costs ~$100 when a superior free version (ebird) is available is beyond me.
end rant.
After using ebird for about 2 days, I already love it. Here are just a few reasons why:
1) It's free
2) My lists are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
3) Checklists update automatically
4) Beyond normal features of listing software it allows all sorts of interesting data analysis
5) It combines every birder's data set into one worldwide database that is free to explore
Just messing around with it I can see that I'm 5th among ebirders for Rhode Island life lists (and only 5 ticks away from 3rd) link and 1st among ebirders for Ecuador for 2010 (though only by 3 ticks, so I may soon be surpassed!) link. Clearly not enough birders use ebird!
Before this post becomes nothing but text, check out this pic from the Chatham County fall count at Jordan Lake last weekend:
A 1st-year bald eagle.
And check out this Red-headed Woodpecker.
We checked the mudflats for shorebirds, but didn't come up with anything super exciting:
Shorebirds:
Greater Yellowlegs
Lesser Yellowlegs
Least Sandpiper
Semipalmated/Western Sandpiper
Spotted Sandpiper
Pectoral Sandpiper
Wilson's Snipe
As always there were lots of Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets. We also saw two Forster's Terns and Caspian Tern.
We hardly had any warbler's worth mentioning:
Black-and-white
Common Yellowthroat
Pine
Magnolia
Northern Waterthrush
Last year when the drought was worse the lake much lower and we saw a Ruff near the mouth of Morgan Creek. This is a pretty rare bird for NC, caused a lot of commotion on the carolinabirds listserve and required me to fill out paperwork for official record-keeping in Raleigh.
Anyway, nothing was spotted this time around to cause any waves, but I did see a Bobolink and two Wild Turkeys for North Carolina birds #206 and #207.
#208 showed up in my bird bath the other day:
A Veery (and yard bird #70)!
From now on I am going to try and include one video clip at the end of each post. I'll start (and end this post) with this one of a flock of 51 Purple Sandpipers I encountered on Wrightsville Beach on New Years Day 2010. Has anyone ever seen this many purples flock together before?
1) A new computer! My 4-year-old Dell is on its last legs and rather than watch it die along with whatever data I hadn't managed to back up, I got a new sleek and light ASUS.
And this change led me to...
2) Move all my bird lists to ebird.
I only used Avisys listing software for a couple years, but I was never really that impressed. It could do a lot of things as a piece of software, but rarely in an intuitive or expedient way (somewhat reminiscent of Windows 3.1 in look and function). Surprisingly it is the best piece of bird listing software available based on reviews.
Anyway, in order to move my lists over from Avisys to ebird I had to first update my Clements checklist from 2005 to 2009...an exercise in tedium that highlighted all that is wrong with Avisys.
(you should really skip reading this example, but I'm going to write it anyway as if you care)
Between 2005 and 2009 ornithological experts split, lump and rename dozens of bird species (i.e. White-vented Storm-Petrel should be renamed "Eliott's Storm-Petrel"). When trying to update to the new checklist with updated names, new species discoveries, lumps and splits, Avisys doesn't know what to do with my sighting of a now nonexistent bird--there is no White-vented Storm--Petrel anymore.
The solution? Sift through .pdfs from 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 of Clements updates for the line that says: "White-vented Storm-Petrels shall heretoforthwith be knownst as 'Eliott's Storm-Petrels'" and manually rename the species. But often the bird will have changed names again, or the latin name also changes, or Avisys simply can't recognize a crucial apostrophe or hyphen, or for unknown reasons an error message still comes up when trying to update.
For "problem species" Avisys advises you (if you are patient enough to read through a page of instructions--which is necessary to achieve most things without problems in the Avisys world) to put that sighting in a different "safe" species temporarily, run find a pen and paper to scribble down the change you made in order to remember to change it back once the checklist has successfully updated. So I renamed my Storm-Petrel "White-faced" (a species that existed in 2005 and still exists today under the same name) and then repeated this process with 25 other "problem species" only to have to swap them back later after a successful checklist update.
Anyway, the whole process must have taken 2 hours and I had not even gotten started importing data into Ebird! There are at least 1,000 easy ways Avisys could easily make the update process run more smoothly. Why anyone puts up with this sort of insanity from a program that costs ~$100 when a superior free version (ebird) is available is beyond me.
end rant.
After using ebird for about 2 days, I already love it. Here are just a few reasons why:
1) It's free
2) My lists are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
3) Checklists update automatically
4) Beyond normal features of listing software it allows all sorts of interesting data analysis
5) It combines every birder's data set into one worldwide database that is free to explore
Just messing around with it I can see that I'm 5th among ebirders for Rhode Island life lists (and only 5 ticks away from 3rd) link and 1st among ebirders for Ecuador for 2010 (though only by 3 ticks, so I may soon be surpassed!) link. Clearly not enough birders use ebird!
Before this post becomes nothing but text, check out this pic from the Chatham County fall count at Jordan Lake last weekend:
A 1st-year bald eagle.
And check out this Red-headed Woodpecker.
We checked the mudflats for shorebirds, but didn't come up with anything super exciting:
Shorebirds:
Greater Yellowlegs
Lesser Yellowlegs
Least Sandpiper
Semipalmated/Western Sandpiper
Spotted Sandpiper
Pectoral Sandpiper
Wilson's Snipe
As always there were lots of Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets. We also saw two Forster's Terns and Caspian Tern.
We hardly had any warbler's worth mentioning:
Black-and-white
Common Yellowthroat
Pine
Magnolia
Northern Waterthrush
Last year when the drought was worse the lake much lower and we saw a Ruff near the mouth of Morgan Creek. This is a pretty rare bird for NC, caused a lot of commotion on the carolinabirds listserve and required me to fill out paperwork for official record-keeping in Raleigh.
Anyway, nothing was spotted this time around to cause any waves, but I did see a Bobolink and two Wild Turkeys for North Carolina birds #206 and #207.
#208 showed up in my bird bath the other day:
A Veery (and yard bird #70)!
From now on I am going to try and include one video clip at the end of each post. I'll start (and end this post) with this one of a flock of 51 Purple Sandpipers I encountered on Wrightsville Beach on New Years Day 2010. Has anyone ever seen this many purples flock together before?
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